Archive for March 9th, 2009

WHILE EXPLORING shamanism and non-ordinary states, I discovered the power of intention. According to the artist Ian Lungold, who lectured brilliantly about the Mayan Calendar before his untimely death a few years ago, the Maya believe that your intention is as essential to your ability to navigate reality as your position in time and space. If you don’t know your intention, or if you are operating with the wrong intentions, you are always lost, and can only get more dissolute.

This idea becomes exquisitely clear during psychedelic journeys, when your state of mind gets intensified and projected kaleidoscopically all around you. As our contemporary world becomes more and more psychedelic, we are receiving harsh lessons in the power of intention on a vast scale. Over the last decades, the international financial elite manipulated the markets to create obscene rewards for themselves at the expense of poor and middle class people across the world. Using devious derivatives, cunning CDOS, and other trickery, they siphoned off ever-larger portions of the surplus value created by the producers of real goods and services, contriving a debt-based economy that had to fall apart. Their own greed – such a meager, dull intent – has now blown up in their faces, annihilating, in slow motion, the corrupt system built to serve them.

IF YOU ARE fortunate enough to share a neighborhood with a leafy elm, a gnarly oak, a soaring redwood, take another look at its silhouette against the sky. That self-similar 4-D explosion of branching branches is a clue to a cosmic riddle or two and a key concept in fields as unrelated as vascular surgery and software design.

The Buddha knew this, and so do neurologists, database programmers, and mythologists.

Axis mundi, the axis of the world, is the tree at the center of everything sacred. Mythologist Joseph Campbell, referring to the Buddha’s awakening, noted that: “This is the most important single moment in Oriental mythology, a counterpart of the Crucifixion of the West. The Buddha beneath the Tree of Enlightenment (the Bo tree) and Christ on Holy Rood (the tree of redemption) are analogous figures, incorporating an archetypal World Savior, World Tree motif, which is of immemorial antiquity.”

To Hindu dream adepts, the question of how you know that you are awake is at once psychological and metaphysical. David Shulman, in Tamil Temple Myths, discussing a character in a myth who realizes that he is dreaming the tragedy of his life, notes: “The nature of his delusion is clear from the moment he first catches sight of the upside-down tree – a classic Indian symbol for the reality that underlies and is hidden by life in the world, with its false goals and misleading perceptions.”

To say nothing of the Garden of Eden and its two special trees. Why do trees always happen to be on the set when God talks? It doesn’t matter whether your cosmology is Hebrew, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Pagan, Shamanist or Animist: trees are always part of the scenery when a theophany happens.

I WILL WEAR my pant-legs rolled And walk along the beach… Then, I will drown myself in the pool. The terrible pile-up on the world’s financial highway has left us all in shock. We check to see if our fingers move. We look in the rear-view mirror to see if there is blood on our face. And then we crawl out of the car. Thank God, we can still walk! No broken bones.

“Let me issue and control a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.” –Mayer Rothschild, founder of Rothschild banking dynasty

RIGHT FROM THE beginning, many prominent Americans such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson have argued and fought against the central banking polices used throughout Europe.

A note issued by a central bank, such as the Federal Reserve Note, is bank currency. These notes are given to the government in exchange for an interest-bearing government bond. The primary means to pay for the interest on these bonds is to borrow more bank notes, thus beginning a vicious cycle that ultimately ends with the complete destruction of the currency and bankruptcy of the nation. History is replete with such occurrences. (Currently, one particular nation stands out: Zimbabwe)

This begs the question as to why such a doomed system would exist? The reason is that during the course of the arrangement, which can last for centuries, the central bankers who issue the money amass great fortunes from the large sums of interest collected. In essence it is a transfer of wealth from the many to the elite few. Government leaders prefer such a system because it does not require budgets to be balanced. It is far more politically expedient to borrow, then to directly tax the citizens.

THE EARTH herself, a great Spiritual Being in her own right, is going through an enormous transition and metamorphosis. The Earth is following this path come what may – we as individuals have the choice to stay with the Earth right through this magical transformation, or to find other options!

What does this mean for the human race resident on Earth?

If we want to stay with the Earth as she evolves through 2012, then we need to change our attunement to life, the way we see situations, the way we act, react and communicate. How can we best address the current potentials and possibilities? The common factor in working positively through this period is to live one’s life through an open Heart Centre.

THE WAR ON DRUGS is a war on consciousness. A prime hidden agenda remains the suppression of an alternate religious view: that consciousness is the nature and purpose of reality, that humans freely create their realities.

I believe that a prime motivation of those waging the current “war on drugs” is to discredit and destroy any “counterculture” before it becomes the dominant culture. Religious fundamentalists have not forgotten the religious upheavals of the 1960s when millions of young people, often after using marijuana and other psychedelics, reading Timothy Leary or Alan Watts, or listening to “psychedelic” music by the Beatles or the Jefferson Airplane, rejected Christianity and Judaism. Even ministers, priests, nuns and rabbis abandoned their callings! Consciousness, altered consciousness, and higher consciousness rather than obedience, duty, and sacrifice became the prime concern of the new spirituality.

A talk given at the Lilly/Goswami Conference on Consciousness and Quantum Physics at Esalen, December 1983. It was to be the first of many lectures at Esalen Institute on the Big Sur Coast of California. This edited transcription appears in print as part of his book The Archaic Revival.

THERE IS A VERY circumscribed place in organic nature that has, I think, important implications for students of human nature. I refer to the tryptophan-derived hallucinogens dimethyltryptamine (DMT), psilocybin, and a hybrid drug that is in aboriginal use in the rain forests of South America, ayahuasca. This latter is a combination of dimethyltryptamine and a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that is taken orally. It seems appropriate to talk about these drugs when we discuss the nature of consciousness; it is also appropriate when we discuss quantum physics.

It is my interpretation that the major quantum mechanical phenomena that we all experience, aside from waking consciousness itself, are dreams and hallucinations. These states, at least in the restricted sense that I am concerned with, occur when the large amounts of various sorts of radiation conveyed into the body by the senses are restricted. Then we see interior images and interior processes that are psychophysical. These processes definitely arise at the quantum mechanical level. It’s been shown by John Smythies, Alexander Shulgin, and others that there are quantum mechanical correlates to hallucinogenesis. In other words, if one atom on the molecular ring of an inactive compound is moved, the compound becomes highly active. To me this is a perfect proof of the dynamic linkage at the formative level between quantum mechanically described matter and mind.